At our 3rd FIG meeting of the Fall, six FIG participants attended, and in honor of November being National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM), we focused on employment transitions for students with Intellectual Disability and other disabilities. Below is the Celebrate NDEAM website that Lisa shared with stories of successful employment transitions for people with a variety of disabilities, including Intellectual Disability: https://www.ndrn.org/resource/ndeam/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=42280600-5522-4708-8632-f7f1844c33ec
In terms of announcements, Sam shared with us the big news that he is moving to another AHRC position, and will no longer be working on KCC’s campus. He is also applying to a drama therapy program at NYU for next Fall, which sounds exciting! It is sad to see him go after just getting to know him, but we wish him well. We are not sure yet who will be taking over his position for Melissa Riggio on KCC’s campus. In other news, Stella and Nick will be attending a meeting with people from CUNY Central on December 9th about CUNY Unlimited and we look forward to their report-back with further information from that event.
We then discussed the film “Summer in the Forest” (trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLf1rx2RPrE) and decided to collectively buy it and watch it together as a group. We are interested in the alternative the film provides to institutionalization and other ableist ways of treating people with disabilities, as well as its inspiring example of how people taking action may be able to change how we conceive of disability on a large scale. This imagine the film will likely be useful to the Education Program in general, and can be loaned out to other faculty for viewing or use in their classes.
Finally, Nick shared with us an insightful presentation on his experiences working to help students with disabilities prepare for transition to employment. What Nick spoke about illustrated both the extreme challenges in finding employment (especially for students with visible disabilities, who face discrimination), as well as the hopeful glimmers we may be able to build on. Nick illustrated how just tackling the basics – preparing a resume, cover letter, and obtaining references – are often completely new experiences for these students, and ones which take them quite a while to learn. Templates are useful for resumes and especially the cover letter, which can appear very abstract to students. References can be difficult, as students have often fallen out of touch with former work mates, or have trouble getting back in touch with their previous jobs, if they have previous work experience.
Nick also shared that “Ken’s Crew” (started by the Langone family who have family members with disabilities) has been one of the most successful models that he has seen for transitions for students with Learning Disability, Autism Spectrum Disability, and mild Intellectual Disability. What makes it successful seem to include a large budget, direct connections with Home Depot, and previously Fairway and CVS, job coaching and transitional services, and an ability to “hold” a job for someone until a position opens. The process of applying and obtaining work also seems much faster and less burdened by paperwork and long strings of mass job visits and other meetings than his experience working through Access VR (formerly VESID).
Takeaways for faculty from his presentation were to always be prepared to serve as references for students with disabilities (which often does not involve a letter, but merely being willing to serve as a reference). Another recommendation was to avoid giving artificially inflated “pity grades,” as this sometimes needlessly prolongs the time that students spend taking classes, and may just be setting them up for academic failure at a later stage. Nick has found that many times an academic track may not be the right one for such students, and they could more quickly transition into the job market in a beneficial way. Above all, Nick and the rest of us hope that we will see a centralized and concerted effort on the part of CUNY Unlimited to make strong connections with employers who are willing to hire students with disabilities – or at least offer internships or part-time employment with possibility for later full-time hiring. It appears that thus far these direct industry connections are too often lacking in CUNY’s work to facilitate employment transitions. We know this is a challenging area for students with disabilities due to societal discrimination and business profit motives above human considerations, but we hope to learn more about the employment landscape and advocate for more job opportunities for students with disabilities.
We’ll be back for more in Spring, 2020!
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
